My small group’s current challenge word is “harmony.” As I was driving home from our meeting I had two phrases pop into my head — “Harmony of the Spheres” and “Simple Harmonic Motion.” After cruising around on the internet for a while looking at various images I decided to settle on simple harmonic motion (SHM).

At this point I knew pretty much what I wanted – several sine waves superimposed on each other with the sections colored in Mondrian fashion. The next big thing was to determine what the frequencies of those sine waves should be.

I thought about using a fundamental frequency and its overtones, but instead chose three frequencies whose ratios, 4:5:6, represent a major chord in music.

Once that decision was made it was time to graph my waves and choose my fabrics. I decided to represent the amplitude of each wave with a primary color and the regions where they overlapped with the appropriate secondary colors. Since I had no regions where all three colors needed to blend I didn’t have to worry about how to represent that (though I had already decided to use a dark brown if I needed that).

I fused a piece of white fabric to a piece of Timtex, fused the colored sections on top of that, and satin stitched over the raw edges (including the outside edge) with black thread.

Now I simply need to decide which side I want to call “Up.” Just for fun I think I’ll take a poll. Please vote on which orientation you like best.